Long Lost Souls
by FAIRxxVIEW
Summary: MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH WARNING. Don't read if you hate tear-jerkers and tragedies. Read authors note. - A patrol of the Second Mass went out to scavenge supplies. And one of them will not return alive. Emotional whump. - This isn't what I usually write.


**Disclaimer:**I do not own Falling Skies or the characters and this is supposed to be a legal disclaimer saying I don't own TNT. If I did then I would be rich. And have a plane. And perhaps my very own library.

**Author's Note:** I don't usually write this kind of stuff... in fact I never do. However, I was in school and bored out of my bloody mind - I have finished the rough draft of my novel and have nothing to do in study hall except for homework - and this popped into my head. And I must say it took me several hours to complete because I kept tearing up, and I don't like crying in class. I'm a baby though - perhaps this isn't that sad for you guys. WARNING. IF YOU DO NOT LIKE CHARACTER DEATH'S, DO NOT READ. This contains a character death. A very important character. No hate. This has no relationship to any of my other stories. One-shot.

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**TOM POV**

It was a patrol like any other. A scavenging mission to a nearby known general store and hospital. We needed both food and medication, because our stocks were running low. Me, Maggie, Ben, Hal, Weaver, Pope, and his Berserkers were with us. We moved carefully, blending into the night, which would be our best cover today. This place was formerly known as New London, a sign said, and we were in the midst of Connecticut. The place was like a maze. It would have been horrific to drive here before the aliens invaded, with all the hidden drives, no way to cross into the other directional lane, and an obvious disdain by the engineers for the ease of people to see where they were going.

There were actually many stores here, and we decided to hit the first one which looked like an old fashion Shop-N-Save, though the name of the store had literally been blown off the wall which was half collapsed on itself. The moment we entered, the tension lit up like a spark into flames.

"Get down!" I snarled, dropping beside a shelf just as the store exploded into gunfire. I lost sight of everyone else as I began to crawl forward, searching for the place the gunfire was coming from. Something about this seemed more human than alien – perhaps because there were people on the other side screaming into the air. Things were exploding off the shelves which were stacked in front of the door, and my hands were now sticky and wounded from the bloody scratches as glass bottles broke on the floor, and I hoped as I crawled that there was nothing poisonous in them.

"Dad"! Hal screamed my name, and for a moment I saw him, standing between me and a man with black markings on his face, standing there like some kind of revolutionary; they fired at each other at the same time. Hal was hit first, and I could only stare as the blood blossomed in a scarlet spray out his back, peppering the floor and my face with its deep red message of chaos. He hit the ground even before the red flowering patterns opened up across the shoulder of the man who shot him down. There was a tidal wave of horror and I ran forward as if in a dream, ignorant of the other shooters turning their sights on the lone gunner running across the open floor to his fallen comrade – and little did they know it was his son. I dropped down beside him and the world suddenly snapped back in focus. I could hear the gunshots and the screaming, the sounds of bullets striking the floor near me, but my gun was dropped and I was kneeling beside him, pulling my son's shaking body into my arms.

"Hal, Hal, Hal," I whispered, repeatedly, my hands feeling the warm, sticky blood that had already soaked through the front of his shirt. Two spots on his back told me that some bullets had gone through, and I pressed him tightly against myself, as though hoping that my own body would prevent the blood from seeping out of him.

I felt a chill racing through me as I saw his eyes, already clouded over, his body in shock, a heavy weakness in each of his limbs. He was shaking violently as though in fever, his jaw clattering, his arms at his sides rather than trying to hold in the life force that was bound to be pouring out of him each and every second. I screamed for help, not caring how broken my voice sounded, or that the people in the store were still shooting at us. I didn't care that the debris-spray from their gunfire had sent the floor splintering up around where I was sitting. I screamed for help until the dead silence that engulfed the entire store, the city, the world, came crashing down on my shoulders.

There was no help. I hugged my son tighter to my chest, pleading with him to stay conscious and continue fighting, if not for himself, then for me. I begged, because my heart was denying the truth of what must be and the cold future of what was to come.

"Dad," his voice was weak and shaky, and my hand, pressed against the wounds on his chest, began to rub up and down as though trying to soothe him from a chest cold. It didn't matter that we were both shaking like a lamb in the icy throngs of winter, or that there were tears pricking the corners of my eyes, threatening to betray the mask of courage that I had tried to put on my face the moment his eyes found me. They were seeing yet unseeing at the same time, knowing I was there, but knowing what was beyond. He could see – something – yet it wasn't quite me. Perhaps he was seeing nothing but the splintered vision of those whose lives were leaking away into the unforgiving tile floor.

"Hal, look at me," I whispered, and I could almost see his eyes trying to focus. They cleared, for perhaps just a moment, and then clouded over again, this time darker than before.

"I wasn't planning on leaving before all of the aliens were gone," he said, starting to slur a little, but managing to keep the words coming. A small trickle of blood dribbled down his lip, another warning of what was to come. I wiped it away with one finger, not wanting to see the sign for internal damage. Had they hit his lungs? Everything vital, yet missing the heart? It did not matter, because the heart could not pump enough blood to make it through the wounds and to the brain and the organs, and they were slowing fading away with him.

He had acknowledged that which I had not, refused to, and never would. The wounds were fatal. But I clung to that strange hope that were the reason for many families falling apart in times before, that there was no way a child could die before their parents. It was a cruelty that I simply wanted to deny, more and more. This shouldn't be happening. He had done _nothing_, and the world had betrayed him and everyone else. It should be me bleeding out on the floor, because I was the father and I was supposed to protect, take care of, and die for my children. It shouldn't be the other way around. We shouldn't have even come here. Why hadn't we taken one look at the barricade-like shelves across the entrance and realized that people might be inside, not willing to share their meager supplies with some intruders that they had never known and would never think of again? My heart hardened like a cold, hard fist, and finally one tear broke away and trickled down my skin, soon followed by another, and a third. And then the rest were coming down, because the dam had broke and there was nothing left to stop them.

"You don't have to go," I said back, feeling like a child pleading for his mother to never leave them. "Not if you don't want to. You can stay here with us and continue to blast those things into oblivion. Matt is waiting for you to come home, and I don't want to make him wait forever," I said, and something cracked inside me as I said that.

How could I say something so cruel? Make Hal for guilty for something that he could not control? That was not how I meant for it to come out – I had wanted to give him a reason to fight against the impossible – but now it was like I had just stepped onto the ice of a frozen lake in February, where the cracks were already appearing of the silver-white surface as it awaited the weight that would break the surface and plunge the ice into oblivion.

"No dad… don't. Hurts," he growled back, and I couldn't be sure whether he meant the physical pain, or the emotional one that was tearing at him – and me – from the inside out. I pressed harder against the wound, needing to stop the flow and make it better as though I could heal him from the inside out.

But I couldn't. And already the shaking of his cold body was starting to lessen as his mind realized there was nothing left to fight with.

"I love you," I said roughly, and my voice broke at the last word, because finally I realized that he would not be walking home with us. He was going somewhere that I couldn't follow, and that it was scared me down to the very roots of my heart. Where was he going? Would he watch over us, guide us, find Mom, and quietly cheer from us amongst the stars and clouds? Was there nothing at all after, and he would just fade away into nonexistence? I didn't want to let him go. I couldn't. I knew I never would. That's why I hanging on so tightly to his unmoving body.

There was just another moment where he mumbled something back, a simple "I love you too, Dad," like he was going away on a trip and would be back in a few days, or was simply hanging up the phone the phone. But that was the last thing he would ever say - that answer saying goodbye to me forever - because a moment later I felt a sharp cold in my entire body and his breathing hitched and stopped.

I lay there on the floor, the world nothing but a vast white field around me, and held onto my son's lifeless body as his blood soaked into my clothes and stained my skin. It would wash off later, but would remain in my memories forever. A scar. Like a deep wound that would never heal. With time it may go away, but the emptiness that remained would never heal. I would never fill it back. Until the day I die there will be something missing in me. Is that what it felt like to lose a child? To lose a piece of your soul that could never be reclaimed no matter how hard you begged?

To me it felt more like he was asleep than dead, so I continued rubbing my hand against his chest, as though it would warm him and wake him up. But he was not waking up. His final words were a dying echo in my heart, and I could still hear the gunshots that would eat away at his life as though they were starving vultures pecking away carrion.

My eyes were open, yet I could see nothing but the same deep red that covered my hands and chest, and I squeezed harder, as though afraid someone would take him from my arms and he would be lost to me.

Arms on my own made me stiffen and a feral noise ripped out of my throat, and I wanted to snap at them and force them away from existence. A voice slowly trickled into my ears and I immediately focused on that, another vice-like grip that I could not afford to let go.

"Tom, Tom, listen to me. Tom, we're going to bring him home, okay? We'll bring him home." It was Weaver, but he sounded strange. His voice was rough. Was he hurt too? I didn't want to take my eyes off the spot that a hole was burning into on the floor. I wanted to lay here and wait, and perhaps some miracle would happen – perhaps some almighty spirit would take pity and bring my son back to me. It was a meaningless hope, yet it was all I had left to hang on to. Bring him home? We had no home. In a few days we would be leaving the place, where he would be buried three feet under, with nothing but two sticks tied together by twine to mark the place of his body.

Anger raged through me. Yet I said nothing. I slowly raised my eyes to see unfamiliar faces swimming in and out of my vision. The gun-battle had stopped, and there was a combination of pity and guilt swimming in the eyes of those left standing. Pity and guilt didn't bring my son back. I looked away, back towards my own people, where jaws were set and eyes were turned away.

Ben was here too, and his arms were on mine, not trying to break the grip but just hanging on to me, his face buried into my neck, and I realized it wasn't just my soul that had been broken.

One soul had left the earth, and the pieces of many others had left alongside it.


End file.
